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Movie Roundup: Chance of Snow Edition



Moonrise – The last film of director Frank Borzage’s career as a steadily working director (he doesn’t have another imdb credit for ten years) is one of his best.  A swampy noir set in the deep South, in some ways it anticipates Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, though it lacks that film’s wild genius.  Dane Clark plays the son of a convicted and executed murderer who grows up barely enduring the taunts of the other children in his small town.  Finally, in young adulthood, he fights back and accidentally kills one of his tormentors.  He succeeds in hiding the body, for awhile, but his guilt begins to eat away at him and the law eventually picks up his trail.  More than a vehicle for noir-plotting, the film is a close-up look at the prejudices and pleasures of small town life, a distant, dark cousin of Jacques Tourneur’s great Stars in My Crown.  The #10 film of 1948.

No Greater Glory – Another excellent Borzage film, this one from the middle of his career.  It follows a gang of kids who occupy a local vacant lot with militaristic games, and their war against a rival, older gang that wants to take over their lot.  The hero is the smallest and weakest kid, the only one of the gang who isn’t allowed to pretend to be an officer, and we follow his increasingly self-endangering attempts to prove his courage to his friends. The allegorical reading of the film is too obvious to be interesting.  Instead, it’s a warmly fascinating look at the games kids play, the ways they interpret and distort the adult world around them.  The film looks at the kids not as avatars for a message of world peace (or whatever), but rather directly as fully functional human beings, ones just as capable of foolishness, bravery, treachery and redemption as any grown up.  few films have ever treated children with so much respect.  The #8 film of 1934.

Topper – A pleasant, relatively minor entry in the screwball comedy genre.  Cary Grant (underused) and Constance Bennett (awesome) play a Nick and Nora-esque couple of rich drunks who die in a car accident and begin haunting their fuddy-duddy friend, bank executive Cosmo Topper (Roland Young, Uncle Willy in The Philadelphia Story).  Grant and Bennett help Topper lighten up with their crazy ghost hijinks, and lessons are learned all around.  It’s fun and mostly harmless, but it could have been better.  This is a problem I have with some screwball comedies: I keep wishing they were written by Ben Hecht or Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges.  This is, of course, unfair.  I’d still rather watch an above average but not great romantic comedy from the 1930s than almost any romantic comedy from the 2000s.  The #14 film of 1937.

The Unsuspected – This Michael Curtiz film falls somewhere between a classy mystery film and a twisted film noir.  Claude Rains is a famous radio personality (he relates tales of murder!) whose secretary and niece have both died.  When a man shows up claiming to be the dead niece’s husband, Rains, another niece (Audrey Totter, always welcome) and her drunk husband are suspicious.  They’re more so when the supposedly dead niece returns and doesn’t remember her husband.  Amnesia, a gold-digging scam, revenge?  It all turns out to be a lot more obvious than the setup promises, but still, it’s a very fun film, not least because Claude Rains is always awesome.  I swear, the man could have made a Dan Brown movie seem brilliant.  The #13 film of 1947.

The Social Network – The best Hollywood film of the year thus far, David Fincher’s account of the founding of facebook is better than its screenplay tries to make it.  Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, as always a wizard with musical exchanges of dialogue, seems to think the film is about facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the Kaneian question of why he did what he did.  He proposes two not necessarily mutually exclusive theories, grounded in a pair of lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg by his former associates.  The first is that Zuckerberg was a social climber, jealous of his rich Harvard classmates’ fancy clubs and boat-rowing abilities (this is the lawsuit filed by the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra).  The second is that he was brainwashed by a coke-addled Justin Timberlake into putting his own “coolness” above his relationship with his best friend (Eduardo Saverin, the source of this lawsuit).  Fortunately, the film presents both theories as inadequate explanations of the facts (pretty much every idea Saverin has for the company is terrible, which should be a fireable offense, and the Winklevoss-Narendra claim on the idea is mostly groundless (the social network idea was already out there, it was Zuckerberg that made the leap that made facebook possible, etc)).  Both of these possible interpretations can be taken as just that, theories proposed by individuals who are suing the person we’re trying to understand, as such, we can accept them as unreliable possibilities (the Kane/Rashomon connection).  There is a third possibility as well, which is that Zuckerberg did it all to impress girls.  This appears to be Sorkin’s theory, as evidenced by the fact that it is not based in court testimony or tell-all books.  Instead, Sorkin embellishes an ex-girlfriend (exaggerating the offensiveness of what Zuckerberg wrote about her in his blog), stupidly makes the facemash website sexist and ignores the fact that through this whole period, Zuckerberg had a steady girlfriend, one whom he is still seeing.  In Sorkin’s version, Zuckerberg gained the whole world, but all for Rooney Mara to be his friend.

Anyway, all this plot and theme nonsense is just that, what makes the film great is everything else.  Not just the performances, which are uniformly excellent, but Fincher’s direction and pacing and willingness to do crazy things like spend several minutes on a crew race in London (in contradiction to the facts, naturally) scored to a Trent Reznorized version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” that begins with a tilt-shift establishing shot just for the hell of it (or is it that to the rich and powerful, the world is a toy?  Nah, it just looks cool).  Basically, I love everything about this movie except what it keeps trying to tell me it’s about, which is false and dumb and kinda sad.  The movie is like ABBA: pop musical perfection trumping lyrical vapidity.

The Lineup – A taut noir procedural from director Don Siegel about heroin smugglers in San Francisco.  The drugs are being put in unsuspecting travelers’ luggage, and Eli Wallach has to go around collecting the packages, killing anyone who gets in his way, before the cops catch up with him.  It’s a precursor to the crime films of the late 60s and early 70s, with coolness and quiet professionalism the highest value (as in Bullitt or Le cercle rouge), as well as a fantastic bit of on-location filming (set in San Francisco, the city Siegel would return to in one of the seminal films of that later cycle, Dirty Harry).  Ruthless and increasingly desperate, Wallach is as electric as always.  His attempts to keep cool pay off in then end when he finally he loses it, leading to a terrific car chase, another hallmark of those later films.  It might be Siegel’s best film, it’s certainly the most flawless I’ve seen.  The #9 film of 1958.

5 Against the House – A weird mix of 50s college comedy, heist film and study of the psychological effects of war on young men.  Brian Keith is the shell shocked one of his four vet buddies, now enrolled, thanks to the GI Bill, in a generic Midwestern University, the one prone to violent rages when some guy looks at his girl the wrong way.  The brainy buddy comes up with a way to rob a casino, and the guys (plus one girl, Kim Novak) set off for Reno to pretend to pull off the crime, you know, for kicks.  Then Keith goes nuts and everything gets real.  It’s all pretty ridiculous, but the film deserves some credit for treating the Korean War vets with some sympathy and respect.  Director Phil Karlson’s done a lot better though.  Also Mike Nichols ripped off The Graduate‘s most famous shot from it.  The #29 film of 1955.

Murder By Contract – Right up there with Blast of Silence, Detour and The Hitch-Hiker among the greatest truly B-level noirs ever made.  Vince Edwards wants to be a hired killer, asks for the chance, waits a long time and gets the job, a job he shows remarkable skill at.  That’s the first third of the film.  The rest follows one job, killing a mob witness at her well-guarded Los Angeles house (the setup should be familiar to fans of Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, which might be a remake of this film).  For this he’s got an audience, a pair of dumbasses along to make sure he doesn’t bungle things (not surprisingly they get in the way).  Like the best low-budget films, this one takes its time.  In its editing rhythms, it actually feels more like a Robert Bresson film (Pickpocket is the natural correlation) than anything being made in Hollywood at the time, though with a score inspired by The Third Man (guitar over zither, this being California).  A beautiful, nasty, melancholy film, I can’t wait to see more from director Irving Lerner.  The #6 film of 1958.

The Sniper – Another film that recalls Dirty Harry, which also revolves around the hunt for a serial killing sniper in San Francisco.  Directed by Edward Dmytryk (and produced by none other than Stanley Kramer), the film veers dangerously close to the social problem genre, as we learn that the killer is targeting brunettes because of his mother or something.  But there’s enough suspense both in the procedural aspects of the hunt and in the killer’s attempts to stop himself from killing to keep things watchable.  The #21 film of 1952.

Scandal Sheet – The B-movie version of The Big Clock, with direction by Phil Karlson from a novel by Samuel Fuller.  Broderick Crawford is the sleazy editor of a tabloid about to push circulation to the level that’ll make him rich when he accidentally meets his abandoned wife and kills her.  He covers up the crime, but his protege and best reporter, egged on by none other than Donna Reed, are hot on his trail.  It doesn’t have the investigating yourself aspect of The Big Clock and while that film is set in the rarified A picture air of rich magazine people played by big stars (Charles Laughton and Ray Milland where this film gets the volcanic Crawford, the lovely Reed and the inadequate John Derek), this film revels in its lower class world: pawnshops, broken down drunks by the dozen and the saddest dance you’ve ever seen. It’s Fuller and Karlson at their grungy best.  The #15 film of 1952.

Movie Roundup: Halloween Edition

Horror of Dracula – The first of Hammer Films’s Dracula films, starring Christopher Lee (Attack of the Clones) as the Count and Peter Cushing (Star Wars) as the vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing.  The story follows the Bram Stoker novel reasonably well, though in this version Jonathan Harker is hired as the Count’s new librarian while he is in fact going undercover as part of a scheme with Van Helsing to stake the vampire.  More violent and bloody than previous versions (Tod Browning’s with Bela Lugosi and FW Murnau’s with Max Shreck, for example), it’s also the chronologically first Dracula film I’ve seen in color, and director Terrence Fisher uses it to make one of the bloodiest pre-60s films I’ve ever seen.  Lee’s very good as Dracula, despite having only a few lines of dialogue, starting as a snippy jerk and quickly turning into a scary beast.  Cushing is wonderful as well: he’s got a great voice.  I also have their first horror pairing, The Curse of Frankenstein here, but I didn’t manage to get it watched before the holiday ended.  The #14 film of 1958.

The Vampire Bat – Director Frank Strayer strives to accomplish the seemingly impossible: cast Fay Wray in a horror film and don’t let her scream.  Why anyone would want to do such a thing I don’t know, but poor Fay, her greatest skill as an actress closed to her, has pretty much has nothing to do in this film about a serial blood drainer preying on a small German village.  It’s half an indictment of lynching as the townspeople, convinced of vampirism, single out and attack the local mentally handicapped kid.  The other half is a weak screwball comedy, as Melvyn Douglas, of all people, tries to act as the voice of wise-cracking, sardonic reason and solve the crime spree rationally.  With Lionel Atwill as the local scientist who may very well be mad.  The #22 film of 1933.

The House on Haunted Hill – Wealthy eccentric Vincent Price invites a group of strangers to stay in Elisha Cook Jr.’s house, and collect $10,000 if they survive the night in William Castle’s classic film.  None of the people know each other, but as Cook explains, seven people have been killed in the house, all in egregiously fiendish fashions.  There’s a pit of acid in the wine cellar, the servants are horrifying, blood drips from the ceiling and most of the guests appear to have drinking problems.  Add to that an obnoxious test pilot, a nervous secretary and Price’s problematic relationship with his gold-digging wife, and you have one swell party.  The plot doesn’t resolve itself quite satisfactorily, but there’s enough creepiness to make it worthwhile nonetheless.  The #18 film of 1959.

Curse of the Cat People – It’s not really a horror film, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with The Cat People, though it is most definitely a sequel to Cat People, Jacques Tourneur’s great film about a woman (Simone Simon) who’s convinced she’s possessed by a demon cat spirit.  Actually, it’s relation to that film is about the same as the relation between Spirit of the Beehive and Frankenstein.  In that film, a young girl is convinced that the Monster is real and seeks it out, which causes lots of trouble for both her and her family.  In this film, Simon’s husband from the first film has remarried and has a six year old girl with his new wife.  The girl is weird and dreamy and friendless and has trouble distinguishing reality from her imagination.  She then makes friends with the ghost of Simon’s character from the first film, which may or may not be real or tragic.  Feeling more like an extended version of the great Halloween sequence from Meet Me in St. Louis (which was released eight months later) than anything else, the film is one of the more touching explorations of childhood loneliness ever made.  The #8 film of 1944.

The Hands of Orlac – Known as Mad Love in the US, but I like the British title better (it’s less likely to be confused with a Drew Barrymore film as well).  Peter Lorre, in his first American film, is an eminent surgeon who’s obsessed with an actress (Frances Drake) who acts out torture scenes in a wax museum/house of horrors.  He goes to see her every night, but is sad to eventually learn she’s married to Colin Clive’s up and coming concert pianist.  But, when Clive’s hands are crushed in a train accident, Lorre manages to transplant another crash victims hands for him.  Unfortunately, those hands belonged to a knife-throwing murderer!  As Clive’s hands begin to act beyond his control, Lorre’s obsession with the man’s wife grows ever more lunatic, leading to a horrific disguise and fantastic conclusion  The direction by famous cinematographer Karl Freund (The Last Laugh, Metropolis, I Love Lucy) is expressionistic in all the right places.  The #13 film of 1935.

Eyes Without a Face – Pierre Brasseur plays a doctor who, feeling guilty for his daughter’s disfigurement in a car accident, kidnaps young women, removes their faces and attempts to transplant them onto his daughter’s face (only her eyes are undamaged by the accident.  Helping him in his crimes is his assistant Alida Valli, who has herself had her face repaired by him in the past.  Director Georges Franju was the co-founder, with Henri Langlois of the Cinematheque Française, and the film feels like it was made by someone with a very real understanding of film history; it feels as much like a New Wave film as anything else, though Robert Bresson (in the subdued acting and editing rhythms) and the German Expressionists are in there somewhere as well.  The big surgery sequence is pretty gruesome, but it’s the mood of the whole thing (and the daughter’s mask, those masks always freak me out) that’s truly scary about the film.  The #14 film of 1960.

Movie Roundup: Shaw Brothers Marathon Edition


8 Diagram Pole Fighter – Gordon Liu’s family, renowned for their excellent pole fighting skills, is challenged by a rival clan.  But treachery abounds and all his brothers and father are killed (except for one brother who goes nuts).  Liu escapes and makes his way to the local Shaolin Temple, where he learns some even better pole fighting moves before getting his revenge.  It’s a darker than usual film from director Lau Kar-Leung, even if the setup is familiar.  In The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, for example, Liu also escapes the bad guys, finds refuge in a Temple, learns kung fu and then gets his revenge. But in that film, the real emphasis is on the philosophy and spirituality and artistry of kung fu, whereas here, Liu makes no real attempt to adopt the Shaolin philosophy, he just works at mastering their pole fighting technique while always keeping his mind set on his totally unBuddhalike quest for revenge.  However, the scene where he finally demonstrates that mastery, and actually achieves some kind of spiritual transcendence despite himself, is one of the great scenes in the genre’s history.  That and the marvelously bloody final battle sequence (far more gruesome than anything I’ve seen from Lau before) are enough to make this a truly great film.  The #5 film of 1984.

Crippled Avengers – If Lau Kar-Leung is the John Ford of kung fu films, with The 36th Chamber of Shaolin as his My Darling Clementine, then Chang Cheh is the Sam Peckinpah and this is his Wild Bunch.  Lau’s films, when they aren’t being outright comic, emphasize the spiritual and communal side of martial arts more than any non-King Hu director I’ve seen.  But Cheh’s are all about the brutality of the violence and how it eats up its practitioners, no matter which side of the good/evil divide they fall on.  After his son is maimed in an attack, a Tiger Style expert makes him some metal hands and the two proceed to terrorize a town for decades.  When they cripple three regular guys and a kung fu expert who tried to defend them (one loses his legs, another his eyesight, the third his hearing, the kung fu guy is turned into a crazy fool) they team up, learn kung fu and seek their revenge.  This film has the reputation of having the best fight sequences in the entire genre and from what I’ve seen, that is entirely true.  Chang reunited the team from his previous film, The Five Deadly Venoms (this group were so popular they appeared in several other films together as well), and while I found that film to be largely lame, a weak detective story salvaged by a brilliant final fight sequence, this film is non–stop beautifully choreographed hardcore action.  I really can’t say enough about it, partially because I just don’t have the vocabulary, but also because despite all the kung fu films I’ve seen in my life, I’ve still never seen anything like the action in this film.  The #3 film of 1978.

The Water Margin – The Water Margin is one of those massive classics of Chinese literature that get adapted again and again into films (like The Three Kingdoms, which last year brought us John Woo’s massive and masterful spectacle Red Cliff, as well as a wonderful video game series).  This film, as the intro explains, is an adaption of five chapters in the middle of the saga.  The story concerns a gang of outlaws fighting political corruption who attempt to free a kung fu master who’s been framed by his servant who’s been sleeping with the master’s wife so they can enlist the master in a fight against an evil government agent and his evil minions.  There’s a dizzying amount of characters (familiar, I’m sure, to those who know the book) and the plot isn’t really as confusing as I made it sound, keeping in mind that it’s really one tiny section in the middle of a vast story.  Anyway, the film’s a lot of fun, with a pronounced spaghetti Western influence (some parts of the score were direct ripoffs actually), an epic scale rare in the Shaw Brothers films I’ve seen and with some good performances, especially from David Chiang, an actor I wasn’t familiar with before, but will see a lot of in the future.  Another film by Chang Cheh, it does have his trademark nihilist streak, especially in the final sequence, which features a pretty brutal bit of nonsensical dying for wrongheaded ideals (think Kagemusha without the guns).  The #11 film of 1972.

Vengeance is a Golden Blade – A solid film from director Ho Meng Hua about a man who’s betrayed by his wife to the Vicious Long Brothers.  Crippled, he flees to the mountains with his daughter to live with an herbalist and his son.  After spending the next 15 years or so crafting a sword which will defeat his stolen Golden Blade, he inexplicably does everything he can to keep his daughter, who’s apparently been training for this her whole life, from taking revenge.  Much of the plot of Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture ensues, which makes for some interesting melodramatics for a kung fu film.  Chin Ping is pretty good as the daughter, but there’s never really enough fighting here to keep things interesting, and the final sword fight is pretty anticlimactic, given the hype created by that killer title.  The #16 film of 1969.

Have Sword Will Travel – The title’s a dead giveaway, of course, but this is another Western-influenced kung fu film.  The director again is Chang Cheh and David Chiang plays the stranger who wanders into town, talking to his horse, who no one is sure they can trust but ends up saving the heroine and defeating the bad guys (spoiler!).  Chiang is a great screen presence, slight and sardonic, he’s like a goofier, more athletic Tony Leung.  He falls in with a couple who are trying to defend a money shipment from a gang of thieves (seems the famous master who usually escorts the annual shipments has gotten so old he’s lost his kung fu, but he daren’t admit it).  The guy in the couple totally doesn’t trust Chiang, not least because his fiancee is obviously into him.  It all culminates in a bloody extended fight sequence, equal parts Throne of Blood, Game of Death and, say, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia as Chiang’s determination to prove his honorability and save the day for all involved reaches gruesome proportions.  The #13 film of 1969.

The Wandering Swordsman – A slightly lesser version of the same story, again teaming director Cheh with star Chiang.  It’s the subtitles, I’m sure, but Chiang’s character here repeatedly gives his name as “Wandering Swordsman” which just isn’t silly enough to be cool.  His character here is a lot dumber than in the previous film, as he gets duped into helping a gang steal a bunch of money from the good guys.  When he finally realizes his mistake (which seems to take a painfully long time) he takes his revenge in a most satisfactory manner.  While the melodramatics aren’t as bold as Have Sword, which is a bit of a plus, it seems more like that’s because everyone was more going through the motions rather than a conscious choice to pare things down.  Still, I’ve yet to see a Chang Cheh film that doesn’t have at least a couple of fantastic fight sequences, and David Chiang is a charismatic enough performer that he almost manages to sell his character’s idiocy.  The #13 film of 1970.

Movie Roundup: Pre-Vacation Backlog Edition (Part Three)

The Big Knife – A mid-50s adaptation of a Clifford Odets play that feels exactly like a mid-50s adaptation of a Clifford Odets play.  Director Robert Aldrich adds some noirish touches and a bit of visual flair, but the movie never really takes off from its stagy origins.  Jack Palance plays an actor with relationship problems who doesn’t want to sign a long-term contract with his studio (which would have been a terrible idea at the time, what with studios collapsing left and right).  The studio boss, played by Rod Steiger, as bigger signifier that we’re in store for a bunch of method acting indulgences, tries to blackmail him into the deal sicne he covered up a crime Palance had committed a few months earlier.  With Ida Lupino as Palance’s estranged wife and Shelly Winters (another method ringer) as a slutty wannabe actress.  It’s probably better than I’m giving it credit for, but I just can’t drum up much excitement for what is essentially candy for actors and playwrights.  The #25 film of 1955.

Man Hunt – A very fun action movie from director Fritz Lang.  Walter Pidgeon plays an English hunter (the World’s Greatest Hunter, naturally) who tracks Hitler down and almost gets a shot off against him before getting captured by Nazis.  He escapes and makes his way back to England, with head Nazi George Sanders hot on his trail.  Pidgeon hooks up with Joan Bennett then makes a lot of silly decisions that are nonetheless plot-necessary and which lead to some great chase sequences (including one with John Carradine) and a pretty intense, if ultimately ludicrous, finale.  A great, and occasionally literal, example of Fritz Lang’s penchant for characters that find themselves trapped in boxes of their own making.  The #7 film of 1941.

The Secret Beyond the Door – Another Fritz Lang thriller, this one a kind of variant on Rebecca or Bluebeard.  Joan Bennett again stars, marrying Michael Redgrave, who she meets on vacation in Mexico.  When she moves into his fancy house, she learns he’s pretty much totally nuts.  Turns out his hobby is recreating, in pain-staking life-sized detail, rooms wherein women have been murdered.  But the door to one of the room’s is locked, what lies beyond it?!?  It’s more prestigious and tasteful than it should be, what with a score by Mikos Rosza and cinematography by Stanley Cortez.  I longed for some low budget sleaziness or the barely controlled atmosphere of a Val Lewton film.  Instead, Lang keeps everything well under wraps, which makes for a fine, but not really great, film.  After seeing quite a lot of his films, I just don’t think I’m a Lang kind of guy.  The #8 film of 1947.

Anna Karenina – The version with Greta Garbo as Anna.  She’s the upper class wife who falls for the dashing soldier, and suffers for her infidelity.  Garbo’s pretty Garboish, pretty but icy and all that.  Frederic March is her lover, Count Vronsky, and much as I’ve learned to appreciate him in the last couple of years, there’s just no way any sane woman would ruin her life because of an unquenchable lust for Frederic March.  Especially when her husband is Basil Rathbone, who looks about the same but can’t help but be cooler.  Really though, the only really attractive person in the film (Garbo’s coldness turns me off, or maybe it’s that mullet she’s sporting) is Maureen O’Sullivan as Kitty.  I really couldn’t see why Vronsky didn’t drop all that Karenina melodrama for her instead.  The #16 film of 1935.

Dark Journey – A thoroughly enjoyable spy film with Vivien Leigh as a fashion designer who’s also a secret agent, or double agent, or triple agent, for England and/or Germany during World War I.  Complications for her complicated life ensue: not only are the counterespionage agents for both countries close to nabbing her, but her new boyfriend, Conrad Veidt, is a German officer and either she or he or both or neither of them are totally faking their affection for each other.  Director Victor Saville keeps everything light and the film flies by at only 77 minutes.  The #11 film of 1937.

Storm in a Teacup – A British attempt at capturing the magic of the American screwball comedy, one that doesn’t quite succeed.  Vivien Leigh stars and is funnier than you’d think she’d be, given that she almost never did comedy.  Rex Harrison is her co-star, and more surprisingly isn’t very good, especially considering that his performance in Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours is one of the best comic performances of all-time, screwball or otherwise.  Anyway, he’s an obnoxious journalist who comes to her small town and exposes her father, who’s running for office, as a snooty jerk who doesn’t care about poor people (specifically an annoying woman who refuses to license her dog and therefore the dog will be executed).  It all gets blown comically out of proportion (hence the title).  It’s got some really funny moments, but for the most part, Vivien Leigh is very, very pretty.  The #18 film of 1937.

The Big Clock – Halfway through this film noir, I realized I’d seen a remake of it.  Kevin Costner’s solid 1987 thriller No Way Out is based on it (though it confusingly takes its title from another, totally unrelated noir).  This one is better.  Ray Milland plays the editor of a crime magazine run by a Luce-esque magazine emperor played by Charles Laughton (sporting the worst mustache in the history of facial hair).  Milland wants to go on vacation with his family, but Laughton won’t let him.  When Milland misses his flight, he ends up drinking a lot with a sympathetic woman who just happens to be Laughton’s mistress.  Milland leaves without hooking up, but Laughton then shows up at the girl’s apartment and kills her.  When Laughton and George Macready (and a mute Henry Morgan) cover up the crime, all the evidence leads to Milland, who has in turn been put in charge of the investigation by Laughton.  Make sense?  It’s a double version of the investigating yourself noir subgenre and director John Farrow pulls it off so efficiently that it always totally makes sense.  The tremendous cast helps as well, and it also includes Maureen O’Sullivan and the always awesome Elsa Lanchester.  A slick film from an excellent year, so it only ranks as the #17 film of 1948.

Movie Roundup: Pre-Vacation Backlog Edition (Part Two)

The Shopworn Angel – A simple setup for a romantic comedy: naive country kid (James Stewart) stops off in the big city on his way to deployment in WWI.  He passes off the photo of a showgirl (Margaret Sullavan) as his girlfriend to impress his buddies, then convinces her to play along when they all actually meet her.  Naturally, the pretend romance turns real.  The tone is perfectly modulated between the silliness of this setup and the desperate realities of young men on the precipice of death and a cynical woman who’s been around the block a few times, and all kinds of credit is due these two stars (as well as Walter Pidgeon as the rich cad who might actually love Sullavan as well).  This is the first film I’ve seen by HC Potter, but I don’t know that he has the reputation for this kind of thing.  Perhaps more credit is due screenwriter Waldo Salt?  Regardless, it’s a delightful film, of not really on the level of other Stewart/Sullavan pairings like The Shop Around the Corner or The Mortal Storm.  The #8 film of 1938.

Give a Girl a Break – One of three great Debbie Reynolds musicals from 1953, along with The Adventures of Dobie Gillis and I Love Melvin.  Like Dobie Gillis, this one also features Bob Fosse, this time playing a much more important role (he’s actually the romantic lead) while not demonstrating as much his unique choreographic style (which was on display in Dobie Gillis and another great 1953 musical, Kiss Me Kate).  Reynolds is one of three actresses auditioning for a big show on Broadway, and Fosse is the director’s assistant who falls for her and does as much as he can to get her the part (this is essentially the plot dynamic of I Love Melvin).  The other two women include the director’s ex (this pair are played by Broadway star Marge and Gower Champion) and a woman the producer is smitten with, a dancer who is secretly married.  The film doesn’t have the anarchic wackiness of the other Reynolds or Fosse films from 1953, director Stanley Donen instead maintains control and focuses the film on a few brilliant emotional moments (Reynolds and Fosse together are particularly charming, as are the film’s final climaxes).  The #13 film of 1953.

Hound of the Baskervilles – I’m afraid that these Sherlock Holmes films just aren’t working for me.  Yes, Basil Rathbone is excellent, perhaps definitive as the detective, and this is definitely an improvement over the same year’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which told an original, and largely stupid, story.  But you’d think there’d be more horror and spookiness to the moor than there is in this film, at least there is in the original story (and the werewolf episode of Doctor Who, as well).  And that’s probably my problem: the Holmes stories in my memory are a lot better than any cinematic versions I’ve yet seen.  Still, by sticking largely to Conan Doyle’s plot and characters, director Sidney Lanfield has succeeded in making a watchable motion picture.  The #27 film of 1939.

White Dog – This Samuel Fuller film about a racist dog is one of the most fascinating and complex looks at American racism ever made, and perhaps unsurprisingly it was shelved by its distributor after accusations that the film itself was racist.  Why the NAACP thought it was is baffling: I can’t imagine anyone who actually saw the film thinking that, but such is the level of discourse about such things, and things haven’t changed much in the intervening 30 years.  Anyway, Kristy McNichol finds this German shepherd, adopts it, and is initially proud of its violent behavior (when it saves her from an attacker) then horrified (when it attacks one of her co-actors in the middle of a shoot).  She takes it to some animal trainers (the excellent Burl Ives and Paul Winfield) who explain that the dog was trained to hate and attack black people.  Winfield makes it his mission to retrain the dog, and the rest of the film is about his attempts to teach the animal that black people are nothing to be afraid of.  The film is based on a real event and a real phenomenon: dogs were trained this way and when an actress (Jean Seberg) found one and her husband wrote a book about it.  Like in most Fuller, the metaphor is both obvious and yet more complex than it seems.  Yes, the dog training is as much about whether individuals in society in general can unlearn the racism they’ve been taught (while accepting as a given that racist behavior is something that is learned), but while the film has that liberal hope at its center, Fuller is more pessimistic about how easy or likely it is to achieve.  It’s telling, though, that the film’s protagonists are a team comprised of a young white woman, a black man and an elderly white man.  The #3 film of 1982.

L’Argent – Maybe it’s just because I saw it last night, but I can’t help but think of The Social Network when thinking about this film.  Not much of what I’ve heard about Fincher’s new film has to do with its perspective on capitalism, though I think it’s more coherently about that than anything else.  Anyway, this film, a late silent from director Marcel L’Herbier is quite upfront in letting everyone know what it’s about: capitalism and the many ways in which it sucks, more or less.  Unkempt and overweight, moneyman Saccard is nearly undone by manipulative speculation on his company by the refined Gunderman.  To make a comeback, Saccard exploits an aviator’s scheme for oil drilling in Guyana while lusting after the aviator’s wife.  Not only is Saccard’s greed and amorality critiqued, but so are Gunderman’s even more villainous snobbery and far more subtle manipulations of people and money (the critique of Gunderman is correspondingly subtle as well).  The only mostly moral people in the film are the aviator and his wife, who are for most of the film nothing but saps.  L’Herbier was part of the French Impressionist school of filmmaking, a group that I have little familiarity with (this is, I believe, the only French silent film I’ve seen from beginning to end).  The film is a visual marvel: the camera always in motion, either subtly reframing characters to express the dynamism of the shifting power relationships or ostentatious set pieces set in the Paris Stock Exchange or a complex climax intercutting various actions with a musical performance on stage (in a silent film).  It’s a marvel, and one that I imagine will only get better on future viewings.  The #6 film of 1928.

The Navigator – One of the major Buster Keaton features that I’d somehow managed to not see until now.  He plays a clutzy rich kid who gets stuck alone on a massive boat with a pretty girl.  The initial setup is wonderfully done, especially an iconic sequence of the two of them looking for and just missing each other when they first begin to suspect someone else is on the boat and the couple’s first night on the boat, that manages to be both hilarious and terrifying (thanks to the floating head of co-director Donald Crisp).  Adrift on the open sea, the two have to learn for themselves not merely how to function on a boat, but the basics of life such as can-opening and coffee-making.  Eventually, Keaton has to venture underwater to fix a propeller (like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, but not really) and the two have to fight a tribe of cannibals that try to eat them.  It’s got a lot of great sequences, but it isn’t quite at the level of Keaton’s greatest work.  The #5 film of 1924.

The Shining Hour – Joan Crawford in a Frank Borzage melodrama with Margaret Sullavan and Robert Taylor?  No, I wouldn’t think she’d fit in either.  But of course, that’s why it works, because her character, a dancer who marries into a wealthy and uptight Wisconsin (?!) family, doesn’t fit in either.  She marries Melvyn Douglas, the brother of Taylor, whose wife is Sullavan and whose sister is Fay Bainter who is really mean to poor Joan Crawford.  Seems Bainter thinks Crawford’s going to disrupt the family by sleeping with Taylor, which, of course, she does, because that’s the kind of girl Joan Crawford is.  The Midwestern setting is strange for this kind of thing, you’d expect New England Puritan repression or Southern gentility masking horrible crimes or something.  Instead, Bainter is mean but right and Margaret Sullavan, as always, suffers nobly.  Good times.  The #12 film of 1938.

Matinee – Joe Dante might be the most underrated Hollywood director of the last 25 years.  Looking at his filmography, I’m shocked to learn that I’ve seen almost all of his theatrical features; I’m less shocked that I’ve liked every one of them.  This might be his masterpiece.  It’s an ode to the world of b-level sci-fi films from the 50s and 60s and the theatres where they played and the experience of seeing them and not being entirely sure whether they depicted things that were possible in reality or not.  John Goodman is the producer/auteur who comes to Key West around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis to premiere his latest film, Mant, about a man who turns into an ant thanks to a freakish dental accident.  However, Dante wisely centers the film not on Goodman’s character, but on the group of kids who go see the movie.  The film is expertly constructed, with the various characters and relationships set up in the beginning, along with the complex effects that will enhance the film’s premiere with everything clicking smoothly into place during the increasingly chaotic screening.  It’s a textbook example of how to build to a farcical climax.  Add to that the nostalgic heart and pure love of cinema that the film oozes, and Goodman’s usual outsized hilarity, and you have a truly great film from a great filmmaker.  The #7 film of 1993.